The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to a trace capture device, and more particularly, to a trace capture device and a related trace capture method. The trace capture device has a trace capture path sharing a built-in data transmission mechanism, which is capable of aligning and correlating collected trace data.
With developments in the field of electrical engineering, bugs and strange issues which may occur in the electronic devices need to be analyzed and fixed via hardware and software debugging. How to effectively collect enough information for debugging operations is therefore very important. The debugging operations include hardware debugging and software debugging, wherein hardware debugging may be more difficult and require more effort. The software debugging requires configuring a trace capture mechanism in an electronic device, to collect the trace data from the processing system of this electronic device, e.g. monitoring the operations of the processing system. An external debugging device is further utilized to analyze the collected trace information for the hardware and software debugging. However, the signal transmission speed of the trace capture mechanism in the conventional trace capture mechanism is too slow, thus limiting the debugging efficiency of the external debugging device.
Another problem that most debugging engineers might encounter is how to align and correlate different kinds of captured trace data and how to extract useful data for analysis. For example, the procedure of mapping the collected trace data to corresponding hardware engines may be too complex.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a novel trace capture device, which can effectively collect trace data for debugging in order to fix issues in electronic devices.